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Harper’s dangerous advice on guns for rural security

By loading up more guns, Canadians can expect to have more innocent victims killed, not fewer houses invaded by strangers.

Last week Stephen Harper said guns provide a certain level of security when you don't live close to police assistance. But, as Irvin Waller and Michael Kemper point out, threats to personal safety in rural areas far exceed any threat from armed house robbers. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

By Irvin WallerMichael Kempa

Thu., March 19, 2015

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken to dispensing advice to Canadians living in rural areas on how best to secure their households with firearms — advice that is so disconnected from the facts about household safety that it might be comical if it were not also so dangerous.

Last week, Harper opined that guns provide “for a certain level of security when you’re a ways from immediate police assistance.” On Wednesday this week, he upped the ante, telling Canadians that critics who say his remarks could fan vigilantism in rural communities are “clearly anti-gun owners.”

The evidence tells a different story.

On the silly side of this new security position, we can say that bullets pass through phantom problems, and so more guns being used differently are not likely to make us any safer. In Canada, home invasions and violent assaults by strangers in rural areas are so rare that they are virtually unrecorded and unreported threats.

And random gun violence is only slightly more likely in urban areas. A quick glance at our recent police data confirms 505 homicides last year for our whole country of 35 million. The weapon most used in homicides across Canada is a knife — easily available in our kitchens. In fact, 40 per cent of murder victims were killed with knives, 29 per cent by beating or strangulation and 26 per cent with a gun.

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More importantly, of the 131 murders with a gun, 85 were gang-related shootings, which by definition do not occur in our typical rural communities. So you are left with 46 gun murders or less than 10 per cent of the total. There are few occasions where guns are likely to be useful for self-defence.

On the more serious side, this advice is not simply a misinformed but harmless electoral ploy. Suggesting that gun owners have their weapons ready for self-defence will encourage rural Canadians to break our laws requiring ammunition and guns to be stored separately. These laws are important because it is well-known that storing loaded weapons increases the suicides, accidents and murders that occur in emotional situations, especially in those tragic cases involving domestic violence.

These rare but still too frequent threats to personal safety in rural areas far exceed any threat from armed house robbers.

Nearly nine out of 10 Canadian homicide victims are killed by someone they know, too often their distraught spouse or separated partner. By loading up more guns, Canadians can expect to have more innocent victims killed, not fewer houses invaded by strangers.

The United States provides tragic evidence of these facts: compared to the 26 per cent of our 505 murders committed by gun, the U.S. sees 70 per cent of its 12,000 murders caused mostly by handguns. Sixty per cent own guns for their protection. So sowing the seed of fear in Canada may get the wrong results.

One of the ironies of the prime minister’s sudden advocacy for armed self-defence in rural communities is that rural America is moving in the opposite direction. Stateside, local politicians are teaming up with victim-centred groups to fight for laws that emphasize crime prevention and reductions in domestic violence. For example, a national movement that currently involves more than 1,000 municipal politicians named Everytown for Gun Safety has joined forces with Mums Demand Sense for Gun Safety to take their fight for gun laws that reduce the number of school shootings and gun-related domestic homicides and suicides to Washington. These people would seem better positioned to lead our discussions about rural safety than our political leaders who are safely cloistered in our urban capitals.

Rather than take the easy path of following some of the U.S.’s worst gun failures, rural safety in Canada would profit most through developing crime and violence reduction programs that have been proven through mostly American research. Massive databases of program evaluation results confirm that sensible prevention approaches that provide non-violent conflict resolution training in schools and community centres protect two of the most over-victimized groups in our society: women and youth.

If the United States were to go full out to follow the policy advice contained in their own databases, we estimate they would save at least 7,000 lives a year that are needlessly lost to the untimely matching of high emotions and loaded weapons. Likewise, our rural households would be a safer place for many of us if we invested in stamping out interpersonal and domestic violence — along with fostering our culture of responsible gun ownership rather than erode it.

Such is the state of our political system that we expect silly statements from professional politicians who have long ceased to be local representatives. For safety’s sake, a line must be drawn at elitist pandering that is dangerous.

Irvin Waller is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and author of Smarter Crime Control.

Michael Kempa is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and is seeking the federal Liberal nomination for Scarborough Southwest.

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